The Epic Take-Down that Kappa Alpha had coming

[Sen's Revenge]

It was never my intention to become an expert in “Confederatized” college frats. But when I upset the local KA chapter, the national organization demanded I prove my allegations. So I did.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Th...qm_g1Rq8_Pi_eg

In the event that this article is behind a paywall for you, it's the story of how a local chapter of Kappa Alpha accused a professor of defamation for criticizing the organization's belief in the "Lost Cause" version of the civil war. When the Executive Director had a meeting with the professor, he proposed (dared?) the professor to prove that his allegations were true.

And he did.

A quote:

Upon the resurgence of the 1920s Klan, William Kavanaugh Doty, editor of The Kappa Alpha Journal, proclaimed that “The Ku Klux Klan was of contemporaneous origins and had an identity of purpose with Kappa Alpha,” and The Washington Times advertised a KA "smoker" event in Washington, D.C., about the KKK’s origins. “The archives of this fraternity, it is stated, contain much material relating to the founding of the Ku Klux Klan,” the Times wrote, “and it is believed among the older members of the fraternity that it was founded by college boys who were members of the Kappa Alpha and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternities.”

Two members of the Washington University in St. Louis chapter stated KA’s Klannish Lost Cause identity most clearly in a glowing 1915 review of Birth of a Nation, published in the KA Journal:

“The Kuklux Klan came and grew and served its purpose . . . [KA] came and grew and it embraced all the Southland . . . and still serves and cherishes those same ideals which the clan came forward to preserve. . . . The actions and the membership of the Klan are shrouded in mystery. . . . But its members wore upon their breast the circled cross of the Kappa Alpha Order. And the Klan served, by militant, warlike means, those same ideals which our Order was organized to cherish."

Those ideals, they said, were “the manners and customs” that Lee’s “personality helped to give . . . that stamp and character which have since connected the name of Kappa Alpha with all that is best of Southern chivalry.”

In Dixon’s Klan, KAs saw themselves.